What have you learned about blogging?

I’m surprised that there are no other statistics blogs. Chris Genovese used to do one but he stopped–and his blog was more personal than mine, less about statistics. I’ve tried to stay on topic (most of the time), since that’s what I have to offer. I have political opinions, cute stories about my kids, etc., but why should anyone care about this?

I’m also surprised there are so many blogs about economics. Especially since psychology is more interesting (to me). Is this just path-dependence, or maybe actually there are a lot of other blogs out there that I don’t know about. I read some econ blogs partly from clicking my link to Alex’s Marginal Revolution blog which links to others. There are also a lot of tech blogs and computer science blogs but this is less surprising given that it’s on a computer. I suppose there are also lots of blogs about current TV shows and so forth that I don’t really have interest in. As it is, I already read too many blogs. I’m trying to spend more time reading the newspaper. Regarding my own blog, first I was surprised that my students/postdocs/colleagues had so little interest in posting, second I was surprised at how few comments I get on most entries. I don’t always know what will get comments, actually. I’ve had some success using the blog as a sort of out-box where I can park my ideas, but it’s not a panacea. For one thing, it means I spend more time on the computer, which is hard on my hands and maybe degrades my general work productivity.

It’s fun having 1000 readers a day (whatever that means; as a statistical consumer I’m remarkably uncurious about where the numbers come from. One day my postdoc discovered that we had set a switch wrong on the counter, and it turned out we had 1000 rather than 500 per day) although it’s hard for me to think if that’s a lot or a little. Many of my favorite statistical ideas have had struggles with acceptance (for example, there are still a lot of statisticians, even Bayesians, who fit models without even trying to see if they produce replications that look like observed data) so the proselytizer in me wants that large audience.

Finally, I’ve learned that writing can be easier than reading. As is illustrated by the above response that I’ve spewed out.

Parts 1 and 2 of this interview.

To me the most interesting effect of your blog is educational — when I read it I feel like I’m getting a painless lesson in advanced statistics. Any idea if it affects many other readers that way?

It’s nice to hear this, but it’s probably like the difference between watching baseball and playing it. A reader feels he or she is getting an education by reading the blog, but you really learn by doing. On the other hand, you (and many other readers) are active data analysts. So I suspect that you’re really learning from your own data analysis. But the blog could be helpful because you go back and forth–something on the blog can inspire you to try something, which then motivates a question which is answered on the blog, etc.

In any case, I certainly help the people for whom I directly answer questions. Years ago I decided it was less effort to answer people’s questions than to say No. (This was back when strangers would email me after reading Bayesian Data Analysis with questions about nonconverging Gibbs samplers and the like.) Anyway, if I’m answering a question anyway, I might as well do it on the blog.

One thing I’ve tried to avoid is the lazy pattern of answering the easy questions and ducking the hard ones. I notice this on some computer bulletin boards (for example, R-help): There are some people who pounce on any easy question that comes up (often to tell people to Read the Manual). But when you ask a hard question, you get responses from a different sort of person. That’s who I want to be. If it takes too much effort to be helpful in this way, I’d rather not try at all.

Part 1 of this interview.

Long ago, scholars taught. Then they taught and wrote books. Scholarly journals began. Scholars taught and wrote books and articles. Now a few of them teach, write books and articles, and blog. For example, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics at Columbia University, whose blog is here. To learn more about this new form of scholarship, I interviewed Andrew.

What led you to start blogging?

I started the blog in 2004 as a way for the students and postdocs in my research group to communicate with each other–the idea was that we would post items on our recent research and half-baked ideas, and it would be an open forum for us to comment on each others’ ideas, also with the opportunity for outsiders to add thoughts. It also seemed like a good way to publicize our work. I decided to post daily, and I figured that on days that I had nothing to say, I could just post one of my old papers. (As it turned out, I actually have a big backlog of blog entries now.)

Have there been any unexpected effects of blogging?

The blog itself developed differently that I expected. My students and postdocs rarely posted on it (except when I went on vacation and explicitly asked them to do an entry per day) so it became much more of my own personal forum. I’ve somehow developed a fairly equanimous “blog personality” in which I can comment on research by myself and others. Beyond that, I wouldn’t say there have been unexpected effects. The most positive effects have been:

Commenters pointing me to software and research of which I’d been unaware;

Having to type up my vague ideas has forced the ideas into a less-vague state; it’s also helpful to have to justify my thoughts to skeptical strangers;

Publicity for my work; I think that my ideas may be reaching more people now than before.

But I anticipated all these effects.

If those three positive effects went away or became small, would you stop blogging?

If they all went away, and they weren’t replaced by something else positive, then I suppose I’d stop. I do have a feeling of accomplishment from publishing every weekday for over 3 years (for my own sanity, I generally keep a no-weekend-posts rule), but if I wasn’t getting anything out of it, I’d probably lose motivation and stop.